Every now and again (mostly in fairly lubricious spam) I see references to “Springbreak” (as in “see our raunchy Springbreak pictures”).
Not wanting to enter popup hell etc I’ve never explored further, but what the hell is Springbreak?
Spring Break is a very popular school holiday here in the U.S. College kids hit the beaches in large numbers. High school kids do similar stuff, on a smaller scale, I guess.
It has been commercialized to the max. Ft. Lauderdale is one of the more choice spots to spend spring break. I think this can be traced back to some movies from the fifties.
Lots of kids get trashed and engage in all of the other things that go along with the party seen.
It’s a one- or two-week vacation in the middle of the spring semester of most US colleges/universities (and, increasingly, primary/secondary schools). It’s usually in the early spring (March/April), hence the name.
The tradition is to fill the break with massive amounts of alcohol and sex, usually in some warm, sunny seaside locale.
Just to briefly elaborate: Spring Break (two words) is typically one week long (as opposed to the several weeks long Easter breaks I’ve seen in England). The name “spring break” simply refers to this holiday (some students just go home, or travel somewhere non-beachy like Europe), but is usually specific to week-long vacations to beach resort areas. jacksen9 mentions Ft. Lauderdale, but that hasn’t been much of a destination in the past decade at least. The biggest destinations now include Panama City, Florida; South Padre Island, Texas; Cancun, Mexico; and Negril, Jamaica.
But some things never change: the goal for most students who go on such a Spring Break is to drink all day long, dance all night, and sprinkle liberally with random snogging/nudity/sex/whatever floats your boat. The spam you receive likely directs you to videos of women being naked, drunken exhibitionists.
Schoolies upsized for the US market.
::shudder::
As a former native of Panama City, I believe that Spring Break brings out the ugly side of Panama City, at least on the beach side (to be pedantic, I should point out that Panama City and Panama City Beach are actually two different towns, although connected by a bridge).
Whenever I go back home (which hasn’t been in a while), I prefer to visit the beach during the winter. It’s much more tranquil then, except when those Canadian retirees take over and start getting rowdy. 
the goal for most students…is to drink all day long, dance all night, and sprinkle liberally with random snogging/nudity/sex/whatever floats your boat.
How is this a break from their college goals in general?
I am trying to cut down on the amount of time I spend dreaming about and wishing I was still at the above stage of life. You people are not helping. At all.
No pesky textbooks to trip over while stumbling to the bathroom to vomit.
Actually, the main impetus was the 1960 film Where the Boys Are. The movie was based on the first part of a novel that concluded with the kids’ attempt to purchase guns and smuggle the weapons to Fidel Castro. Imagine if that activity had become the quintessential collegiate rite of spring…
Spring Break is basically an excuse to do whatever. Of course, my spring break this year was spent in Naples, Florida. Not exactly a spring break hot spot…although a very popular place for the eldery folk, I found out. My days were spent at beaches, my nights spent gambling in a friend’s parent’s house that is normally rented out to people, but luckily the most current tenats were evicted. The house was not so great. Holes everyware, nasty carpet, no furniture, lizards and ants in the house, and for three days we had no water or electricity…but it was the best time I ever had in college.
And might I say that NONE of the twelve people who went got drunk or had any sex.
So if I get an email saying “see raunchy pictures of Bouv’s spring break” I can be pretty sure it’s spam, huh?
Spring break has been around as long as there has been either quarter breaks (for those on the quarter system) or Easter Vacation (for those on semesters). But “spring break” as a week-long beach-based bacchanale — recent? My impression is that this is a fairly new. I was in college 10-15 years after Where the Boys Are, and nobody did much on spring break except go home and eat your parents’ food.
Spring Break (also known as Easter Week) was well known in So. Calif. in the early 1960’s when I partook in the ritual. Usual destinations then were Newport Beach (particularly Balboa Island, where it was known as Bal Week) and Palm Springs.
We were on the semester system then and it was generally the week just before Easter, but some schools, the week just after.
The party was definately on.
Sternvogel appears to be on target; Where the Boys Are is generally credited with having made the trip to Ft. Lauderdale a national institution, as it remains to this day.
There was, of course, a custom of going to Ft. Lauderdale already; otherwise a novel could not have been written about it. After the publicity generated by the movie, however, the practice became much more widespread.
The movie, while far from an outstanding classic, is not bad. It mostly preachy. Early in the film we see Yvette Memieux and some of the other principal characters attending a sex education class at the unnamed, snowbound, campus they attend somewhere in the northern midwest. The lecture is about “indiscriminate dating”.
Later, when they arrive in Ft. Lauderdale, Memieux’s friends express concern about the large number of young men she is going out with on short acquaintance. Eventually she is raped and, in an interesting comment on social attitudes of the time (at least as protrayed by Hollywood), she talks tearfully about how she thinks she can never get married now.
Much of the language in this portion of the film is guarded and euphemistic, and no one will come out and say what, exactly, happened to Memieux. Weirdly, when I was an undergraduate in the mid-1970s, a classmate of mine (who was the editor of the campus paper) was convinced that Memieux was upset because she was pregnant. The entire course of the plot runs a little more than a week. I asked my friend how she could possibly know that she was pregnant in that length of time, a point which had not occurred to him to question. Maybe there should be more sex education in college.
The film ends on an upbeat, if rather instructional, note, as the main female lead, Dolores Hart, decides that she and her wealthy new boyfriend George Hamilton will continue dating each other throughout the coming school year rather than rushing into a commitment. By contrast, her girlfriend Paula Prentiss decides to drop out of college to marry her new boyfriend Jim Hutton. Nobody seems to find her remark that with a body like hers she meant to have babies rather than study in college odd or objectionable.
There are other popular Spring Break locations besides Ft. Lauderdale. When I was in graduate school in Texas in the late 1970s there was a vogue for going to Padre Island in the Gulf of Mexico. In a striking comment on the current state of American society, black students tend to have their own, separate, destinations in Florida.
With so many students interested in drinking and partying descending on the same spot at more-or-less the same time (not all college observe Spring Break in the same week), it is inevitable that there is some trouble with drunk driving, vandalism, etc. Lurid coverage of the few instances which did occur were a staple of television news coverage in the sixties and seventies, giving the impression that the place was a virtual war zone.
From this there has developed a well-established urban legend which has tittilated generations of bluenoses that the students in Ft. Lauderdale are, in the main, engaging in wild abandoned sex orgies in public.
I recall first hearing this back in the late 60s when I was in the seventh grade or thereabouts at a Catholic grade school in St. Louis. Our pastor was just a wonderfully stupid fellow, a monument to what can be done with prejudice and ignorance in the absence of fact. nd told my class this for a fact, and described how it was all he could do to keep from belting a parishioner in the mouth when she told him that her college age daughter was down in Ft. Lauderdale. I imagine a few of my classmates who had college age brothers or sisters were a bit upset that night.
Early in the movie Joe, which was released around 1970, there is a scene where Peter Boyle, an ignorant Archie Bunker-type construction worker, is sitting in a bar ranting about college students having orgies down in Florida. Only he doesn’t know who to pronounce “orgy”, and gives it a hard “g” like in “angry” or “go”: “these kids, having actual or-ghees”…
Location.
When classes are in session the above activities are usually done within driving distance of the places classes are held.
During spring break, that is less likely to be true.
Location.
When classes are in session the above activities are usually done within driving distance of the places classes are held.
During spring break, that is less likely to be true.